Steam early access available now... Here's the blurb and here's a video... First and foremost, we’re building a FUN racing game with PERSONALITY. It’s all about the stuff that really matters: varied tracks, cool cars, and the defining once-in-the-lifetime moments that can be achieved only with true-to-life physics simulation. If you’re familiar with the original FlatOut experience, you already know what we’re aiming at: exhilarating racing action with sophisticated physics and damage modeling, only this time we’re upping the ante on almost every front. This is the game we envisioned way back in the early 2000s, only re-imagined for today’s technology and gaming standards. Oh, and we’ve got full-blown, straight-up demolition derbies, too, to go with your full contact racing. The cars are old, cheap, banged up, patched together, rusty… just awesome! In short, our cars ooze with STYLE! You won’t find anything like them in other racing games. We’ve got variety: everyone loves the old American heavy-hitters from the muscle car era, but we’re not neglecting the fun little European and Asian cars from the long-gone decades either. The best part is that you’ll be taking them apart and building them back up again in your garage. Need more horsepower on a budget? No problem, scour the classifieds for a bargain supercharger – just remember that a cheap bargain find might not withstand too much punishment! The career is as much about your garage and your project cars as it is about racing. Exciting Engine.Our in-house ROMU engine is a beast. A hell-bent beast that’s precision-engineered for high-speed, breakneck racing. You could not create this experience with just any engine. The ROMU engine is all about heavy metal going way too fast and crashing into stuff. At Bugbear we’re all about putting you in the driver’s seat. That’s why our engine is simulating everything, to give you great feedback on what your car is doing. You’ll feel the little bumps on the track, the weight of your car when you go over them – and most certainly you’ll feel it when you’re being dealt some damage, only that getting HURT has never before felt so good! We can’t wait to show you what we can do with today’s hardware. Now we have fully dynamic visual car damage (no predefined damage models!), and the environments are more destructible than ever before. Essentially, we can now put a ton of flying metal and dirt in the air at any given time, and we certainly will!
Pre Order here.... http://nextcargame.com/ The weekend smasher deal is just the game (w Steam key) but you get early access build to play now (as seen in VVV videos). Then you get the full game once here.

It's absolutely criminal that this doesn't have it's own thread yet. It's one of the best games in years and one of the best RPGs ever made. It's a kickstarted project which puts many triple-A games to shame, and is storming up the Steam charts. It's currently more popular than GTAV and ARK. It's selling well - half a million so far.
https://www.divinity.game/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/435150/Divinity_Original_Sin_2/
https://www.gog.com/game/divinity_original_sin_2
Opencritic (Currently 92%)
Metacritic (Currently 93%)
It's a classic pen and paper style RPG brought to life with great production values, a fully voiced script, and 4 player multiplayer. I currently have two games on the go, one with a group from work and one with a group of friends, and I'm having an incredible time. Within a few minutes of play you're left wondering why all party based RPGs aren't multiplayer. They all seek to replicate the pen and paper D&D/Pathfinder etc format, but forget the most crucial element - people to play with.
Combat is very similar to D&D or Pathfinder, with the crucial twist of systemic elemental "stuff" thrown in. poison, oil, fire, water, ice and steam all alter the playing field in different ways both in and out of combat. To give you an example, an enemies fire spell will set oil on the ground ablaze, which can be put out with a water spell or a telepathically chucked barrel of water. That creates a cloud of steam, which can be enchanted to provide a healing effect to anyone standing in it - and so on.
The campaign is very open ended, anyone can be killed or bartered with and the story reacts accordingly. The multiplayer elements work shockingly well too. Any player can initiate a conversation with an NPC, which the other players can observe by clicking on them. Icons show when your party is listening to the conversation. This leads to you having to decide which character will initiate conversations based on their race or persuasiveness. The game uses a 4-character party, but can be played with two or three people. The playable characters are divvied up between the players, so two players could control two each, and three players can take turns controlling the fourth character. Depending on your group, the game can play out like a gnarly tactical combat slog, a casual stroll through a lovely fantasy world with friends, or a gentle trolling simulator. Check out the co-op video below. It's equally good as a shut-yourself-away-for-a-week singleplayer RPG too.
Levelling and character building seems wildly open to interpretation, letting you create all kinds of strange synergies. I'm playing a necromantic rogue who uses blood magic to sacrifice their own HP to boost their attack, but then regains HP by attacking enemies. You can go with the straight-shooting tank/dps/healer combo, or get really wacky. There's a guy on Reddit trying to complete the game by building a class who throws barrels at people.
Characterisation is clever. You can build a custom character of any race and eventually pick up an assortment of prebuilt "origin" characters to join your group , like most party based RPGs. But you can also select what's called an "origin" character for yourself. By selecting one of the six prebuilt origin characters, you'll inherit a back story and extra dialog options specific to that character. Playing a four player multiplayer game with four origin characters is a blast, you all have a backstory and quests to achieve, and there's nothing to say your goals won't conflict with each other down the road. Each character has their own quest, mine is simply to kill everyone on a list. I also started with a tattoo needle with which I can tattoo my victims names onto my body. Dark. Characters are well written, well voiced acted and quite amusing. They've taken the "Rimmer" approach with some of them - pompous and annoying but equally naive or suffering. As a result they're quite compelling and occasionally laugh out loud funny. One character seems to think you're his slave, and on meeting you accuses you of having the fashion sense of "a monkey in a clown suit"
On top of a large campaign, the game has full mod support for additional campaigns. It also have a "GM" mode where a fifth player can create a campaign on the fly and DM it. There's a video of this below.
It's also quite popular on Twitch at the moment too.
I really recommend getting a group together, picking one night a week you can all make, hopping on a Discord server and throwing yourself in. It also has full controller support (Xbox andPS4). I imagine it'll come to consoles at some point as did the previous game. Incidentally, you don't really need to play the first one to find your feet here.

Microsoft's Reward scheme. It's alright. In about 15 months I've made just over £240 from it and I've not been doing it religiously. It's not the gravy train it once was, but it's still a simple way to get Xbox credit in return for a good use of your time while sitting on the toilet, a tenner a month or so is easy enough to attain. Interested? Of course you are!
Go here https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/rewards sign up using the MS login you use for your Xbox, follow the instructions. Click on everything available for points under https://account.microsoft.com/rewards/ and also do the desktop PC Bing searches to finish off - for those it's easiest to search for a letter under image search, and middle click on 30 different options. You can do it on mobile in a browser desktop mode, for that just put in a search term 30 characters long and delete a letter, search, delete a letter and so on until you've done the searches. Once you're earned 500 points (takes a day or two, there are all sorts of welcome offers to hoover up) you'll be at Level 2 and be able to earn direct from mobile searches as well (again, via Bing - app or set it to default search on your browser), and that's your lot.
Daily, you get 3 points per mobile search (up to 60) and 3 points per desktop search (up to 90), along with three "daily sets" of things to click on. They're usually 10 points each, but there will be a couple of occasions per week where it's a quiz on one of them for 30 points or similar. Do those every day, and you can earn extra points for "streaks" where every few days you'll get a bonus for your streak, which is 15 points per day no matter what really:
Streak 1, Day 3 (3 days) = 45 pts
Streak 2, Day 8 (5 days) = 75 pts
Streak 3, Day 13 (5 days) = 75 pts
Streak 4, Day 20 (7 days) = 105 pts
Streak 5, Day 27 (7 days) = 105 pts
Streak 6, Day 35 (7 days) = 105 pts
Streak 7, Day 44 (10 days) = 150 pts
There's often additional stuff to click on daily and you can also pick up a number of points a day by using the Xbox Rewards app on the Xbox One, but that's tended to be 15 points per day so is a bit crap. You can get a couple of thousand for buying particular games or hardware, but sales generally beat doing that. You also get some points back for any game you buy from the MS store regardless. The occasional email gets sent with links for additional points, usually only 50 and they're only once few weeks at most.
All in all, you can get an absolute minimum of 180 points per day just from a couple of minutes searching and clicking, with some extras on top. To what end? Rewards! Live Gold subs, Game Pass subs, Xbox Credit, Microsoft Credit, and things from other vendors that are really poor value. You can easily fund a month of Game Pass every month (6800 points, 17000 for 3 months), I usually save points for credit, of which Xbox and MS Credit are identical so pick whatever makes sense (currently they're 5850 or 4410 points for a fiver, respectively - the latter is on a 30% off deal 'til the 15th of October). As of the other month, any credit gets deposited directly into the redeeming account and you've got 3 months to spend it so you can build up 30 quid in your account if you like but then you have to spend some, but it gives plenty of time to hang on and see what comes up in the various sales. Gold and Game Pass are still supplied as codes to use anywhere.
Anyway, the sums above only add up to a fiver of credit a month at best though, but you can near double it up. You're allowed 5 accounts per household, and if you set up a pair of accounts as a family you can transfer 5000 points per month between them. The only thing I'd recommend is using a separate phone number to verify each if you're asked, and don't ever set up a kids account as it's a right pain in the arse with the age restrictions. If you have two pairs of accounts, you can use the other pair to gift games to yourself if you go for credit (a code for the game gets emailed). If you want to rapidly gain points it's a bit finicky but you can use a VPN and pretend you're in the US, where they generate points almost twice as fast as we can. Switch back to UK, deposit points to the paired account, switch back. Might get your account banned doing that, but it'll only be the rewards part of it so there's little to lose.
Here are my accounts, this is after exactly the first two weeks in September which is when the Streaks were added to the UK side of it. I use the second account to feed 5000 points to the first every month, and I'll probably use some of the slack to buy Gamepass subs. Not sure why the second account has earned so few by this point in comparison.
Same sort of thing here with another couple of accounts, but the second account is gaining points from the US side of it and you can see the difference - almost a couple of thousand points more in 14 days. Lost that streak the day after, bloody timezones did for me. Again, second account feeds 5k points per month to the first but getting it to work was a bit of a pain given the functionality wasn't available on the US side so lots of region switching in the MS account was needed as well. Think it just works now, they got the transfer functionality added the other week.
There you go then, that's it. I can appreciate a lot of people can't be arsed as it does take a bit of effort to really go for it plus Bing is awful and so is the Bing app, so there's that.
edit: 2018/2019 Hot Deals, tend to run from the 16th of the month for a month, or thereabouts.
2018/07: MS Credit (20% off)
2018/08: Xbox Credit (20% off)
2018/09: MS Credit (30% off)
2018/10: Gamepass (25% off)
2018/11: MS Credit (30% off)
2018/12: XBL Gold (20% off)
2019/01: Skype (25% off)﻿
2019/02: MS Credit (20% off)
2019/03: Gamepass (25% off)
2019/04: XBL Gold (25% off)
2019/05: MS Credit (20% off)
2019/06: Xbox Credit (20% off)
2019/07: XBL Gold (25% off)
2019/08: MS Credit (20% off)

“The devs have taken the best of the deckbuilding and roguelike genres to craft an immensely deep, frustrating, and gratifying experience. Slay the Spire is a perfect example of “easy to learn, hard to master”.”
10/10 – goombastomp “Slay The Spire made me fall in love with deck-building”
Rock Paper Shotgun “Slay the Spire is the Roguelike Card Game I Never Knew I Wanted”
Waypoint
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I've seen this game pop up quite a lot recently and I can see why, I'm about 6 hours in and completely hooked! The only card game I've ever really given the light of day before this was Duelyst and while this is much easier to pick up and play it is by no means any more forgiving. Just now for example I was on an almost flawless run through Act 1 with some of the best items the game was kind enough bestow on me, only for me to get completely rekt halfway through the second act. I've only managed to defeat the second boss during one of the daily runs and it keeps destroying me on the standard quest mode, yet I keep coming back for more. Brutal but fun!
So if you're up for a singleplayer card game with easy to understand mechanics that also features a terrific soundtrack then definitely give this a go. I know some of you already own this so I'm curious to learn what strategies you've been using!

The above trailer is pretty...
Surprised there hasn't been any interest in this title on here, given the popularity of the Zero Escape series. Written and directed by Kotaro Uchikoshi, it's basically the Jennifer Lopez film 'The Cell', in game form. You play a detective who solves crimes by entering the dreams of others. And like that film, it's pretty grisly.
Outside of the trailer, I've been pretty much on blackout for this. It looks right up my street and I'll be day one on its release on July 26th.

Did a search for a topic on this but couldn't find one. Maybe not a surprise considering I've seen two videos so far, saying they'd not really heard of it before the last month. This is developed by Gunfire Games and mashes together a few genres. It's part souls, part Borderlands and a bit rogue-like. You can play online with up to three others or play solo, completely offline.
It looks to have highly customisable characters, no micro transactions, with a promise of paid and free DLC. The gunplay looks pretty good though the locations seem quite sparse. There's the promise of 40+ weapons, excluding Melee. Over 100 enemy types and 20-30 bosses.

Konami’s classic run-and-gun franchise Contra seems to be back. And no, it's not a pachinko machine. On Tuesday, Konami revealed Contra Rogue Corps, a new over-the-top entry in the series.
Two years after the Alien Wars had ended, a mysterious area called the Damned City arose from the grounds where the final battles took place.
Ruthless Fiends roamed the area, bringing a world full of madness.
In the midst of chaos, 5 scoundrels emerge...they are the Rogue Corps.
They do not look anything like heroes of justice, but have they come to save humanity, or maybe they are looking to hit the jackpot by searching the Damned City for treasures...either way, the fate of the world is in their hands.
Contra Rogue Corps trades the traditional side-scrolling perspective for a top-down isometric view of the action, like previously done in Super C and Contra 3: The Alien Wars. Players will shoot up Damned City, both as classic Contra characters like Kaiser, a mutated bug and ... a panda bear?
Official E3 2019 trailer:
Contra Rogue Corps will feature single-player and multiplayer gameplay when it launches on September 26.

No Man's Sky NEXT
List of rllmuk players (Google Doc) - Add your forum name and online handle to play with others here!
Related threads:
General photo thread
PC owners (for technical discussion, etc.)
Ships photo thread
What is NEXT?
Official patch notes: https://www.nomanssky.com/next-update/
Trailer
NEXT is the latest, free update to No Man's Sky. This builds upon the three previous updates: Foundation, Path Finder, and Atlas Rising. The major additions with NEXT are:
Here's a NEXT preview by Eurogamer.
Other notable new features:
Resources for New and Returning Players
How do I...?
Rocket jump: Tap melee and jetpack in quick succession and you'll perform a boosted rocket jump that moves you a fair amount forward. Bear in mind that this causes life support to drop quicker than usual (as does any use of jetpack), for a split second, which is critical if you're playing Permadeath or Survival mode.
Toggle first person/3rd person view: press down on the d-pad and scroll left or right until you come to the camera options. Note: there are separate toggles for flight and while on foot. If you toggled 3rd person while walking, you'll have to do it again while flying if you want 3rd person for both.
Get a freighter: given this is kinda part of normal progression, I'll put it in a spoiler. It's not really a spoiler, per se
Get nanites: Call up your scanner while on foot and scan flora and fauna. Go to the Discoveries tab in Options (PS4 pad) and upload the discovery to get nanites. Nanites no longer take up inventory space, and it's much easier to get them.
General FAQs
Eurogamer guide for new players (seems pretty comprehensive)

by PlayDead Studios
Official Site
Release Date: XB1 June 29 2016 | Steam July 7th 2016 | PS4 August 23rd
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Did Limbo ever come to Sony's device(s)? Otherwise this sure is a reason to own an XBONE.

by Dodge Roll Games
Official Site
GoG | Steam | Humble | PS4
Release Date: April 5th 2016
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Already got my pre-order in as this is looking like it could be a bit good! Also this bullet is wearing a bandana:

WoW is going back to where it all started with the relaunch of WoW Classic which is out next week. There has been some chat hidden away in the random wow thread in the online forum, but this probably deserves it's very own thread.
Back to the days where the game was more social. Where working together with others was important and where dungeons weren't just a quick 20 minute faceroll with no one talking to each other. Back to when your class choice actually meant something and when Paladins and Shamans were only playable on one side.
You only need a subscription to the current game to be able to play.
I played WoW from release day until some point before WOTLK came out and it was amazing. Since then I've tried pretty much every MMO that has come out and they have all ended up being a bit of a disappointment, probably because they never lived up to the fun that was the early days of WoW. I am beyond hyped!
Rllmuk does WoW Classic discord https://discord.gg/hGtAhT8
Rllmuk player and server list https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IkRiGQTa8i2mxiHXkfjoOXqdf1bEyet3jqqmzbrV4x4/edit?usp=sharing

By Infinite Fall
Official Site | Steam | GoG | PS4
Release date: February 21, 2017
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If you're like me and like your games to be short and sweet or 'all killer, no filler' then Night in the Woods seems like another... winner! I've been enjoying these narrative focused games a lot as of late and titles like Life is Strange, Oxenfree, Inside, Kentucky Route Zero, Firewatch, etc all do a terrific job of telling a story without being self indulgent* or having to rely on padding to increase their play time. That being said I do feel like some of these games are a bit too pricey though. This is currently €20 on Steam which I feel is a bit too high considering it will most likely be a 4 to 6 hour game. Then again it might very well end up being worth every penny so who knows. I hope we'll get some reviews soon as it does look very promising.
*This does not apply to Dear Esther as even though I was a fan of that game I think we can all agree that its writing was kind of taking the piss, to say the least.